Delivery technology company DoorDash Inc. (NYSE: DASH) has opened a new Seattle office at the 2+U tower downtown.
The San Francisco-based company opened the 30,440-square-foot office earlier this month, moving from a roughly 7,000-square-foot WeWork space across the street at 1201 Third Ave. The new space will accommodate DoorDash's growing team in the area, as the company now has about 600 employees based in the Puget Sound region.
"The majority (of the employees) are still tech, and by tech I mean the umbrella of engineering, product, design, analytics, things of that sort," said David Azose, senior director of engineering at DoorDash and the Seattle site lead. "But we have seen a large number of non-tech disciplines grow here as well."
DoorDash in 2019 acquired Caviar, which had a presence in the Seattle area, and hired a dozen or so employees in the area during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. Azose said the company made its presence in Seattle official in October 2020, when he was hired, and DoorDash opened its WeWork office in July 2021.
The new Seattle office features conference rooms, communal space, a kitchen, phone booths and a parents room. Different rooms in the office are named after local merchants on the DoorDash platform.
The Seattle hub was initially focused on two teams: DashMart and DoorDash Drive. DashMart is the company's e-commerce convenience store offering, while DoorDash Drive is the company's service to help merchants offer delivery directly from their own websites.
DoorDash has more than 15,000 total employees, including about 1,900 in the Bay Area. Azose said DoorDash wanted to hire in the Seattle area because of the expertise here, and there is an appetite among local talent for moving away from a few huge big tech firms to companies more in the middle market.
Azose said DoorDash doesn't have any specific mandate for how often employees must come into the office, instead leaving it up to individual teams to figure out. As for building a culture in the Seattle area for the months between DoorDash announcing its local presence and opening the WeWork space in July 2021, Azose said it was an interesting challenge. One approach was delivering welcome gifts to new employees, many of which Azose himself delivered as a DoorDash driver.
"I would show up on their front door, at a healthy distance with a mask on, and wave and get to see them and meet them in the flesh," Azose said. "I personally delivered several dozen."
